


The End Of Everything

by Ark



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Angst, Blood, M/M, Sex, Slash, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-27
Updated: 2012-02-27
Packaged: 2017-10-31 19:37:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/347656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ark/pseuds/Ark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the last night they'll ever be like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The End Of Everything

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pleasebekidding](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pleasebekidding/gifts).



> For the wonderful pleasebekidding, who wanted a Ric who wanted.

  


At the end of it all, it turns out to be just a night like any other. Nearly just like any other. 

It's a good sort of night, better than the usual run, with no imminent death-threats that day. No mangled bodies had been found, no kidnappings had occurred, there'd been 72% attendance in class, a new record. The kids were in a good mood because winter break was coming and Alaric had played Creedence Clearwater Revival to teach them about U.S. History and let them play hangman on the blackboard.

Around lunchtime Damon had texted: _Shopping for dinner. Want anything special?_

Alaric poked at his tray of glued-together yellow noodles and unidentifiable pink meat-stuff. The teachers' table in the cafeteria was its own special kind of torture, what with Ms. Addison the guidance counselor in a near-perpetual state of nervous breakdown, a new coach every other week, and a fast-fraying faculty body. It always seemed like more and more seats were empty. Teachers quietly transferred to other counties once they realized the nature of the town they'd ended up in. Transferred or died.

 _You,_ he'd texted back. _Also curry._

A little horny-corny, sure, but Alaric was trapped in the Mystic Falls High cafeteria with his phone as the only lifeline to the outside world. When Damon was awake during the school-day he could generally be counted on to provide an amusing stream of textual entertainment so that Alaric didn't snap every time a student gave an answer straight out of Wikipedia instead of the textbook. 

_Hot,_ had been Damon's near-immediate reply. 

So Alaric went over for dinner on a good sort of night, after a day of endless mundanity he should have been grateful for but left him restless. All day long, on all days like this, he feels unfinished.

Damon meets him at the door of the boarding house smelling of coconut milk. He's flushed with the heat of cooking and disheveled hair marks his brow like black ink. Alaric doesn't say anything, just pushes in against Damon, pushes Damon in against the doorjamb, breathes in all of Damon's spice. 

It's rare to see Damon so rosy but the fire from the stove has done it and Alaric puts his cheek against Damon's, feels radiated warmth. He kisses Damon's mouth, which is trying to shape some sort of unnecessary verbal greeting, and he greets Damon with his tongue instead. 

A minute or an hour later Damon breaks away a little, worrying Alaric's lower lip between his teeth. His eyebrows go up as he pulls further back. “Long day, Ric?”

“Not long enough,” Alaric admits. His fingertips quest over Damon's hipbones. “God help me, I was so bored I was half-wishing you'd call about some terrifying monster.”

Damon smiles lopsidedly. “I'm the only one of those around at current,” he says, letting his body lean into Alaric's full press. “Stefan's flown the coop. Off to write Byronic poetry at the lakehouse, probably. Can't be helped.” 

It's what Alaric had wanted to hear. Damon hears his heart beating and smiles up to his eyes. “I do appreciate that boredom turns you on. It's enough to make me long for an ever-peaceful Mystic Falls.” 

Alaric tries to imagine that: a Mystic Falls that was safe and sound, where the streets were quiet at night and the woods could host boy scout troops. A Mystic Falls that didn't attract the supernatural underworld like flies, a place where children played in green yards and grew up and went to high school and graduated from it. It's as mad and maddening of an idea as witches and vampires and werewolves and vampire-werewolves and whatever people are calling themselves these days. 

What must they call Alaric? _Ring guy. I'm fucking ring guy. Ric the magic ring guy._

So instead he hums against Damon's neck and says, “Sure, soon enough, man. Lemme know when that happens. But don't you think it's been too quiet?”

Damon tsks, moves them from the door and closes it. “You're getting paranoid. It's your need for speed. Gotta remember to make the most of the down days when you get them.”

“Yeah,” says Alaric. “You're right about that.”

“Come on,” says Damon, tugging towards the kitchen. “I made two kinds of curry, but just a tip, you probably don't want to try the red one.”

In the kitchen they sit close to each other, shoulder-to-shoulder at the counter. There's spicy green curry for Alaric with cut vegetables, cooked meats and fried tofu, stacks of flat breads and heaps of rice. Both of them eat ravenously. Since bourbon isn't much of a match for turmeric they start with white wine and work through bottles of it, toasting 12% alcohol content.

Alaric speaks easily about the spare highlights of the day, mimes the most cringe-worthy moments. “Think you might have to compel Ms. Addison for her own good,” he says, reaching for more bread. “Normally I wouldn't ask, but the poor woman is so screwed up with reports about vampires and hybrids I'm afraid she's gonna commit herself.” 

Damon shrugs. “Done,” he says. “But whatever happened to the kid who cheated on your test with the notes in his shoe? I liked his style,” and dinner stretches out over talkative hours. They have homemade coconut ice-cream for dessert, which they carry into the library.

On the overstuffed leather couch they can be closer together than on the counter. Damon leans against the armrest, turned sideways, one foot on the ground and the other flung casually across Alaric's lap. He cradles ice-cream in one hand and a bottle of bourbon from their reserve stock in the other, and is working the cork loose with lips and teeth. Alaric watches with appreciation. 

In the library, they share bourbon back and forth and talk and laugh the way they like to, with roaming hands and teasing touches, with long minutes lost to feisty kissing and groping exploits. It's rare as an untroubled day to have the whole big house quiet around them, to have their phones off, their responsibilities laid to rest, just two sort-of men lounging on each other on an antique couch.

Alaric has been careful to take smaller pulls of bourbon than on some nights. On some nights, he and Damon drained bottles dry, smashed them in the fireplace, smashed each other up against bookshelves, trying to erase some horror or another. He only ever regretted when they damaged books.

It's a good sort of night, tonight, though. They have a fire built high in the mantle, which is swept clean, no sign of broken bottles. Rooms echo with delicious emptiness around and above them. Alaric is absently rubbing Damon's leg where his knee travels up into thigh. Damon's leg is cast over him like a rope. The next time Alaric kisses him Damon tastes of the finest grain liquor and his lips are sticky with coconut.

Alaric knows their luck, knows there won't be many nights forthcoming like this one. And that's important. Doesn't want this out of desperation or revenge or from anyone else. Wants it because he wants it. Wants it because he asked. Both of them have waited a very long time for him to ask. 

But in the circle of warmth from the firelight, with Damon settled close and the bourbon between them, Alaric is silent for an infinite space. He closes his eyes and engraves what this feels like deep into his memory. It's so good it's practically criminal to interfere. 

He does it anyway.

“I want you to turn me,” Alaric tells Damon's laughing eyes, which stop laughing.

He has expected many reactions to this, tried to anticipate them. But the sharp flare of anger that emerges first still surprises him, still almost knocks him off-balance. Damon truly angry is as terrifying a sight as one imagines it would be, the entirety of his mocking cheer gone, all of his face made a snarl.

“Not this, Alaric,” he says. He only calls him “Alaric” during intense sex sometimes or when something's serious, like a recalling chide. “Only don't joke about this.”

Understanding the anger then, tilting into it, Alaric shakes his head. “I'm not. I'm serious, Damon.”

His face must look serious enough then because Damon's anger becomes shock becomes joy becomes fear becomes cautious. Becomes all delicate caution. 

“Ric. If—if you are—” Joy floods in again before it's tightly clamped down, pushed hard beneath his eyebrows. Damon makes a porcelain mask of his features, fixes it in place. “Why now? Why tonight? Nothing's happened...”

“Exactly.” Alaric reaches to catch Damon's chin in his hand. With his fingers cupped to Damon's cheek, he angles their eyes to meet. Damon doesn't blink. 

Alaric says, phrasing it it like past tense: “If it was ever meant to be it was meant to be on a night like this, when things're quiet. I never wanted to become a vampire because I had to. Choking on emergency blood while I died horribly, or turned by someone else to hurt you or Elena...it's only a matter of time, isn't it?” 

Damon starts to make a protesting sound, but Alaric still has hold of his jaw and won't let go. He holds up his free hand. “Then there's this ring. This...thing. It's wrong, Damon. I can feel it. Something's wrong with it. No man is meant to cheat death as many times as I have. At some point nature has to intervene. Balance things out.” 

He lets go of Damon and takes off the ring, heavy on his finger and in his palm, always heavy. He puts it on the sidetable. “I want to choose my own death before my accessories do. And I choose to become a vampire, Damon Salvatore, so that I can spend the death I've earned as I see fit.”

Damon just breathes, looking like he's far away. “Ric,” he says, trying to come back.

“I want this,” says Alaric. “It isn't just about balancing nature or making sure I'm around to protect Elena or fight the crap we face. I want this for both of us.”

Damon's expression shifts to something in a relationship with sad. His voice comes soft. “I would have stayed with you to the end of this life you chose. Whenever and however it ended.”

“I know,” says Alaric. “That's why I'm choosing that we get to dictate its end.”

On the couch they're sitting as close together as clothed bodies can. Damon is all mirrorball eyes and electricity given human form. When he reaches for Alaric's hands, the small fine hairs stand up on the back of Alaric's neck. 

But Damon's silent for so long that Alaric says, hesitating, tripping on English, “That is. I mean. If your offer still--”

“Oh, shut your mouth,” Damon snaps, abruptly returned to himself, and Alaric grins, and Damon smirk-smiles, and they burst into entirely the same pitch of laughter verging on hysteria at exactly the same moment. Damon releases his hands and passes over the bourbon, and this time Alaric knocks back a shot's worth and more.

“Alaric Saltzman,” Damon says, taking back the bottle and firmly re-corking it, as though for punctuation. “Just so we're clear on this like crystal. I've wanted this for--” 

_For a hundred and fifty years_ hangs between them. Damon's quest for a partner to match him had spanned more than one century into the next two, had consumed him and driven him onward. The mere idea of saving Katherine had kept him vital, the fixation on protecting Elena had rendered him more humane, but being with Alaric had changed him, made him better. Balanced him out.

It was Damon's first real relationship of equals, and Alaric's, too, if he's being honest. He'd loved Isobel and she'd had a shrewd mind -- too shrewd for her own good, in the end -- but he'd loved her with puppy adoration and oaths, and he'd never really known who she was until it was too late. He couldn't love what she became. 

Instead he'd come to love another vampire. The time had long passed for the word to be hidden between them. Damon had said it first, one afternoon a few months and a few lifetimes ago, after mind-blowing sex in the hayloft of an old whitewashed barn. On the ground below had lain the bisected bodies of the rogue hybrids Klaus had sent them after. He was holding Elena at the Mikaelson mansion until the job was done but Elijah was there and they weren't too worried; when Damon and Alaric had set off Elijah was teaching Elena how to play mahjong with ancient jade tiles. 

At least the Klaus-kidnappings had become considerably more pleasant, and after they'd laid waste to the hybrids and thoroughly fucked each others' brains out Damon had said it first, at last, all come-and-gore-slicked, so Alaric didn't have to. 

Damon knew Alaric had a thing about this, knew he grew afraid of the end when it was voiced. But it was too true not to say so Damon said, stretched naked alongside him, “Fuck, Alaric, I fucking love you,” and Alaric had laughed with his whole body and pressed a kiss to Damon's damp dark hair with the dead hybrids scattered out of sight and said it back.

Theirs was a relationship of intellectual equality and shared interests. Both excelled at sipping and sex and slaughter. Alaric had lived half his life for history and Damon was living history, had lived through the stories in Alaric's books. Nothing about Damon was never not fascinating, and Alaric was surprised, then pleased, to find the feeling returned. 

“Why _do_ you like me so much?” he'd asked one evening after Damon pulled him, with mixed whining and cajoling, from the Mystic Falls Winter Harvest Festival. As Damon pointed out there'd be another celebration again soon enough and winter harvests were made up anyway but Alaric hadn't gotten nearly enough hard cider to be satisfied. Then there'd been enough students stumbling around intoxicated to know class would be canceled in the morning and he'd sighed and let Damon lead the way back to the loft. 

With Damon tearing at his clothes and trying to devour his neck in a too-literal fashion Alaric had asked, “Why _do_ you like me so much?” and Damon, cheerful as the knowledge of a long night of fucking ahead made him, pulled back to say smilingly, “You see through the bullshit of the universe, like me. You'll play along, but only sometimes, like me. You're hot as fuck, like me,” and then he had pushed Alaric down on the bed and climbed on top and resumed devouring him.

In everything they were equals. Everything but this.

“For a very long time,” Damon is saying. “I've wanted this for a very long time.”

“I know,” Alaric says. He's saying “I know” so much he feels like Han Solo at the end of _The Empire Strikes Back_. Shakes the image of being frozen in carbonite. 

“I'm not sure you do, Ric. I've wanted to turn you since...since...” Damon tilts his head, trails off. With his bright eyes looking away the room feels darker.

“Since the first time we hunted together?” Alaric gamely suggests. “ _But you can't deny, we were bad-ass._ I saw it on your face. Also you kissed me. And we--”

Damon draws half a smirk at the memory. “No. It was before all of that. It was the first time I saw you at the Grill, grading papers splashed with bourbon. When we hunted was just the first time I nearly did it.”

“You saw a drunk-ass teacher screwing up his job at a bar and then shaking with the need to kill you and thought, _That one must be mine for all eternity_.” Alaric does a husky impression of Damon's voice on the last, trying to lighten it, trying for levity. 

Damon's smile stays even. His teeth are very white. He turns his gaze back on Alaric and that, too, is even. “Yes,” he says.

“I knew after today,” says Alaric, trying to keep talking so Damon can't get a fix on his racing pulse. “After tonight. After dinner, after the library. This proved what I knew. I think we can still have this no matter what I am.”

“This, only better,” Damon says with enthusiasm, a little too quickly, so that Alaric's right eyebrow goes up. Damon amends, “I didn't mean it like that, Ric. You know I love you adorably human as you are. I just mean...You know how we say everything's more intense for vampires. Imagine that you could focus your hearing and hear the embers slowly dying in the fireplace, calling for more wood. Imagine that you could listen to heartbeats, which tell the truth more often than people do. Imagine that we could run all the way to Washington D.C. on a jaunt,” says Damon, offering a wicked grin, “and screw amongst the Presidential monuments while you expound on their history and I fill in the gaps.”

Alaric flattens Damon against leather, kisses him fiercely. For endless minutes they make out with the hunger of teenagers discovering the act. They get tangled up and Alaric's arms are around Damon and Damon's are around Alaric. 

They kiss with they eyes open. It's with their eyes open, kissing, that Alaric lets his teeth sink into Damon's lower lip. Teeth meet tension, and Damon's cloudy eyes gather lighting, and Alaric bites down with purpose and Damon's blood fills his mouth. 

Neither blink. Not when Alaric swallows molten copper. Not when his tongue soothes against the hurt.  
Not when Alaric moves for a second sip, then a third, to be sure, to show that he's sure. 

Damon's blood is like the lightning in his eyes. It crashes through Alaric, jumps him up like the best and worst kind of drug. This isn't the first time he's had it but it's the last time he'll ever feel it like this, he realizes, if they go on. Vampire blood isn't a point of no return and he and Damon both know that, but it's the starting point.

A good night for this, this night. If it is going to happen Alaric wants it like this. Just him and Damon, Alaric's decision and Damon's blood, just the two of them. 

There are many downsides and practicalities to consider that go beyond them though and Alaric has tried to think of every one, has made lists that birthed lists. He's nothing if not a pessimistic practicalist. Eventually he has to stop kissing Damon, has to watch Damon's lip heal and swallow against the thick taste of blood in his mouth. Damon won't stop looking at him, his eyes wide as searchlights.

The first cut is the deepest, so: “You know what I want,” Alaric manages to say. They've talked about this eventuality a lot -- mostly Damon has, but Alaric had indulged him on the subject occasionally, and Damon knows. It feels strange to be signing his own death sentence, but it was more of a luxury than most men got.

Damon nods, minutely, so Alaric goes on. “There're letters in a shoebox under the bed at the Gilbert's. Some for now. To Elena, to Jeremy when he comes back, to Bonnie begging for a ring so I can go outside, to the council, to the school...” It's getting harder to speak. He picks up the bourbon from where they'd let the bottle fall and uncorks it. 

Washes down the last traces of Damon's blood and then some. “There are other letters. In case something goes wrong,” he starts, then stops to let Damon voice his inevitable protest. “Just in case. This isn't an exact science, Damon. You know that well as anyone.”

Damon shakes his head, all adamant black hair, but stays wisely quiet after the initial outburst. Alaric drains another mouthful of whiskey. Will it ever burn this way again, like honey on fire? 

He continues. “Letters to family, to old friends, a couple of friendly exes. Letters to my parents. Letters for Elena, for growing up.” It shouldn't be so difficult to speak. 

He thinks of the neatly bound packet of letters waiting for Elena in case he doesn't come back from this. Letters to open at different times of her life. Alaric had started simple, her high school graduation, college. Writing the card for her wedding day had been harder, it had been so fucking hard not to think he'd be the one to guide her trembling and beaming down the aisle. Halfway through the letter celebrating the birth of Elena's first child he'd gotten so drunk he had to stop. 

But he'd been writing the letters for a long time and lately they'd begun to feel more natural and less mournful. He was so full of things to tell her, advice he wished he'd had, praise and a surprisingly deep love for her that he set to words and pages. He did his best to explain why he had chosen this way with Damon in the end, and in the end the act of baring his soul to imaginary future Elena had helped decide it.

 _I know it's crazy after everything, but we really do love each other,_ Alaric had written to Elena. _Make sure that when you're in love, you choose someone who is your equal, and who treats you like it even when you aren't._

Damon won't stop staring, and Alaric is blinking too hard, thinking too hard. Damon says, “I swear to you I'll be with you every step of the way on this. Your contingency plans are appreciated, and charming, but give me some credit. I've been asking you about this for _years_. Can you imagine the thought I've given the process and other, more varied follow-up plans should anything unforeseen occur? Can you?”

Alaric looks chagrined, but thinks he can be forgiven the nerves. “Sorry,” he says. “I trust you.” 

That's important to say, and Damon's pissy look erases and he bends over to kiss again. Before their mouths touch Alaric whispers, “I want to know your back-up plans and I don't.” Images of animal-attacked bloody bodies and bolted bloody cells dance dangerously in his vision before he clears it.

“Don't worry,” Damon assures. “Trust me,” and he kisses Alaric almost hard enough to return the bite. When he pulls away it's difficult to mask his hunger, his impatience, the flare of purple-red veins around his eyes betraying him. But Damon has waited long enough. Can wait a little longer. His face returns to pale. “You're calling the shots here, Ric. The shots are yours to call. What now?”

Alaric has a very long pull of bourbon, then relinquishes the bottle to the ground. He wants to cry and laugh and scream and dance and howl at the moon. 

He finds himself smiling. “How do you think I want to spend my last few hours on Planet Earth as a human being, Damon?”

In bed, it's the same and different because it's the last night they'll ever be like this. 

The first time is almost like their first time. They're all over each other, all over everything, so turned on that they risk further bloodshed with the force of it. 

Clothes are torn and ruined and discarded. All they encompass now are frantic reaching scratching hands and crushing lips and tongues, raw curses and challenging encouragements like the filthiest of poetry. 

Alaric bends Damon over their favorite chair and takes him from behind, hard, too hard, his grip on Damon too hard, his cock too hard, Damon all too pliant, everything the way it had been the first time seven or eight lifetimes ago. 

Damon lowers his head and then tosses it and then he looks back over at his shoulder at Alaric like he had the first time. Takes him in, all of him, the too-sharp thrusts and then Alaric's wildly desperate rhythm, lets Alaric hold his hips too hard and fuck him like fucking's going out of style. 

The first time Alaric's face had looked a little shocked once he was buried deep in Damon and that's the main difference now. Neither of them had denied the initial attraction and Damon had kissed him after the exuberance of their inaugural hunting victory sure but neither of them had expected Alaric to respond by throwing Damon against the wall and following after. 

Then Damon had said “Thank god, the sexual tension was _killing_ me,” and they'd wrecked the house of dead vampires a good bit more and Alaric had found a chair and bent Damon over it and they never looked back again until now.

When they actually reach the bed they stay relatively still in it a while. Alaric wraps his longer body around Damon's the way they like to sleep on good nights. On nights like this. He cards fingers through Damon's hair, tickling the nape of his neck. They speak in low voices when they speak.

“I've been telling myself that if Caroline Forbes can find her better nature and fight the cravings...” Alaric props a smile, and Damon turns his head to let his raised eyebrows finish the thought so as not to besmirch Caroline's fortitude. “I worry about Elena, though. She's been through so much, it doesn't seem fair--”

Damon cuts in, gentle about it. “We'll bring toys to her great-great-grandchildren, Ric, the same as we've always done.”

The second time is careful, and drawn-out, and very slow, the way they seldom but sometimes did. Occasionally one or the other was recovering from a near-death (usually Alaric), or they were too intoxicated to rip each other apart, or too exhausted. 

Sometimes they did this, just lay together touching until it was too much to stand, so that when Alaric eases into Damon it already feels like a release. Damon's mouth is hot and wet and open under his own, Damon spread open under him, a feast for the taking. Alaric takes him inch by inch, feeling everything, trying to burn how this feels into his brain. Grits his teeth to keep from crying out. 

Then he says, to Damon's registered amusement, “Fuck it,” and he isn't quiet about it. He pants and growls and groans and tells Damon exactly how fucking good it feels, how fucking good Damon feels, tells him in the space between breathing and voicing even filthier thoughts. When they lock into liquid rhythm and Alaric can thrust in just right and Damon's arms and legs loop around him they move together with the surety of eternity. Alaric keeps murmuring love and lust because this, this open-hearted bleeding-hearted self given over to sex despite its consequences marks him as human. 

They come to the end of it as slowly and carefully as they'd started it, Alaric's lips back on Damon's and the push of their bodies trying to defy the limits of skin. If they could be closer than this they would be but there's nowhere left to go. 

Damon has mostly let Alaric do the talking for once. His tarnished silver eyes are impossibly round when Alaric reaches to stroke his cock with Damon's favorite stroke. He comes like a gun going off in Alaric's knowing grip and then Damon says, “God, I love you,” while he's shaking with it, so Alaric doesn't have to.

 _And I love you more than I love this life,_ Alaric thinks, but that sounds too Twilight in his head, so instead he smirks at Damon, steals Damon's default expression. Says, “You don't believe in god,” and he's not ready yet so he keeps riding up against Damon, into Damon, keeps his cock angled deep. 

“But I believe in love,” Damon says, and he closes his eyes like he's trying to record what this feels like too. He says it flatly and without sarcasm, the tone strange in Damon's mouth, the line cheesy like something from pop song and probably stolen from one. Alaric takes him harder, and Damon says, eyes still shut, blindly walking fingers up the joints of Alaric's spine and into his fair hair, “I think it's the only thing that I believe in.” 

Alaric lets himself come to that, like an Amen, comes with Damon's fingers threaded in his hair and Damon opening his eyes to watch him do it. Damon is tight everywhere around him, holding onto him, anchoring Alaric in place inside him while the world moves. Their lips press noiselessly, out of words. 

Afterward they rest for an hour collapsed together so that Alaric can dream.

Damon's questioning thigh is nudging him. Alaric loses hold of dreaming and remembers. Against him Damon's body is ready to go again and Damon is more than ready to go but Alaric shakes his head, holds them lying together in bed a moment longer. 

“Wanna go outside,” he says at last. Maybe that had been in the dream. It feels right anyway.

Damon shrugs. “The calling of shots, I repeat, is yours.” He slips naked from bed and walks to the dresser with Alaric's gaze following every fine curve of muscle, every exquisitely-made ivory line and limb. He starts to try on a dark shirt, blacker even than the charcoal of his hair. It slides over his skin like a shroud on marble.

“Don't,” says Alaric.

Damon's eyes snap over, but Alaric shakes his head, gestures. “The shirt. Don't. Not a funeral,” he says, and Damon nods, and takes it off. The next selection is olive green, Alaric's favorite color. It wraps Damon in verdant warmth instead.

Alaric has a drawer here with some clothes and he picks more blindly for himself -- _not a funeral_ \-- and they go into Damon's airy bathroom. They turn on all the lights and share a too-hot shower, using every fragrant bottle on the rim and standing interlocked for a long time in the gathering steam. 

Then Alaric shaves, brushes his teeth, combs unruly wet hair. Little things. Almost like he could be going to work at the school. In a few hours Elena's alarm clock will go off.

They load up the car with supplies and stop in the library on the way out to pick up the bourbon. 

Damon hands over the keys without a word, and Alaric drives them, tires squealing and engine roaring, out onto the open road away from the boarding house. 

Theirs is the only car and this is Alaric's last chance to drive like a human, like a happy maniac steering a giant death machine. They tear past silent houses and rip into the highway at twice the speed limit. Next to him Damon is laughing.

Alaric stops at a 24-hour mega-grocery store on the outskirts of Mystic Falls. He buys every food he's ever loved and a few that he hates and everything he's ever wanted to try or think he ought. The bags fill up the backseat and they both make a mess of it tearing open snacks at random.

Back on the road he masters multi-tasking by driving with the gas pedal pressed almost horizontal, eating a spongy Hostess cupcake, and relentlessly channel-surfing on the radio, keen to hear it all. 

They ride with all the windows down and the wind whipping in and the sound of every station blaring through the speakers. Eventually Alaric settles on classic rock. Damon leans over the armrest and leans silently into his shoulder. They drive through the dark with everything going by too fast. 

The parking lot leads to a series of deep-forest trails that Alaric knows. The sprawling hill is almost big enough to be called a mountain. They sling bags over their shoulders and set out with flashlights since no boy scout worth his badges would be caught dead with a headlamp. 

Alaric has spent many years in the outdoors, in wild nature, learning how to tame it with boys' tricks and the collected wisdom of men. In bed with Damon he had dreamed of the woods, he remembers. It feels good to be back here. 

He shows Damon what he learned, blazing an unhesitating trail through the spare paths and dense foliage. They go in and up, picking their way past tall trees Alaric names and clinging brush that tries to hold them back. 

The trail steepens and narrows and Alaric feels the wonderful trickle of his own sweat in the cold night air, the hard pump of his heart, the steady way his feet find their way and his body screams for more, to go further. Hiking is ever a rush to its adherents, a ceaseless pursuit of the final goal.

At the top there is an open grassy clearing carved out against the trees. From the top they can see very far down and far away. 

Alaric has earned his scouting badges. He'd made it all the way up to Eagle. He sets up a neat outdoor camp and builds a small fire in a dug pit with Damon watching, arms crossed and expression amused at the bustle of activity. He lights the fire with a sliver and spark of flint to show off. 

They sit on the spread of sleeping bags and have a strange meal -- string cheese and chocolate truffles and bourbon and granola bars and apple sauce and M&Ms and carrots and Cheerios and bourbon and vanilla pudding with those little cookies and rhubarb and peanut butter and pretzels and bourbon and salami and strawberries and too many flavors that blur on Alaric's tongue.

They take off their clothes and lie under the stars. Tonight they're burning low in the sky. Alaric knows their stories along with their navigational secrets. He points out a few, telling Damon ancient myths. The gods made the constellations into the shape of those they'd loved and lost and wouldn't relinquish to time. When Damon turns to touch him his eyes are nearly as bright. 

On the hillside there is only the sound of them and the life in the trees and the stars are close and watching. Damon fucks him like it's Alaric's last day alive, like it is. 

It has stopped being about the pursuit of pleasure, of sex or rutting or even love-making. Damon is precise and perfect as a ritual. They roll over onto the cool grass and seal themselves together. 

Damon drives into Alaric, drives him into the earth, and his eyes never leave Alaric's. Alaric looks back the whole time except once, when he watches the glimmering stars with their dead-alive light over Damon's shoulder. They are the realization of a more perfect whole than when apart. There is nothing between them now but ground and sky and blood.

When they come shuddering together it is only another manifestation of what they are. Damon takes a very long time pulling out, pulling away, like it's the wrong direction to go in. His lips brush Alaric's, a bird's-wing's brush. His eyes are twin full moons. 

He isn't supposed to wait, but he does.

Alaric has half-expected the pause. “Just so we're clear like crystal,” he says from underneath Damon. “I choose you. I choose this.” They're pressed together, aligned both parallel and perpendicular. But there's enough hesitation in Damon's intensity that Alaric feels a lurch of fear: they've gone too far now to go back and he doesn't want to. _He doesn't want to._ This is what he wants.

“Feel how slow and steady my heartbeat is?” he asks Damon, instead of telling him. Damon blinks acknowledgment, but still doesn't move, so Alaric hitches up a certain leg and hitches a slow grin. “One more drink,” he offers. “For the road.”

Damon's eyebrows climb toward the constellations, but all too fast any sarcasm fades to gray. Fades to purple. Mottled veins show dark under his skin, and pointed teeth slip into place with a sharp snick of sound Alaric knows well. Damon hungry, Damon, vampire, is beautiful and terrifying and terrifying and beautiful all at once. 

Damon moves to Alaric's offering. Too fast his mouth is fastened to the firm plane of Alaric's thigh, then travels up to find the guiding hipbone, to find the carefully raised network of scar against skin. A series of circles upon circles, the exact replica of Damon's teeth to Alaric's hip, chiseled over and over with the precision of a master sculptor. 

After so much time it has become a web made of thin silver lattice-lines. Damon traces through the maze of it with his tongue.

Alaric nods, and that shivers through his body, and then Damon bites down to make a last imprint. It wounds and aches, and it hurts like a bitch like it always does, but Alaric only watches Damon reclaiming him, renewing the promise of the scar. If he thinks about it with Damon drawing blood near the bone they've been heading here since the first time Damon drank from him, since the first ring of changed skin. 

Only unlike other days and nights, Damon isn't being careful. He's careless in his drinking, drinking hard. Alaric feels his blood rushing down and his brain's protest but he lies still, only moves to tilt his lower body more firmly into Damon's grasp. Damon's hands grasp, and clench, and his teeth are deeper than they've ever been. The air smells of blood and sex and bruised grass.

Damon moves away when Alaric starts to see more stars in his hazy vision than are in the sky above him. He tries to lick the blood clean from Alaric's hip but it keeps welling up in little droplets. Eventually he settles at Alaric's side, propped up on his elbow. 

All the veins are starkly bold in Damon's face and his eyes are polished coins. He wipes red from from his mouth and starts to say it, but Alaric stops him. Damon looks as hungry as he's ever been. His strong arms are pulling Alaric up, pulling him in and close. They're still naked in the dirt, the sleeping bags be damned, their combined sweat making mud. 

This time, Alaric says it first. He's no longer afraid of the end. “I love you, Damon Salvatore.”

Damon's smirk is fully realized, his eyes ablaze above it. “I know,” he replies, taking Han Solo's line this time for himself. “I still don't know how I managed that.”

“My poor decision-making skills contributed,” says Alaric.

“I love you, Alaric Saltzman,” Damon says. “It was the best decision I ever made and also I had no choice in the matter whatsoever.”

“This is where we choose,” says Alaric. 

On the hillside under other worlds, Damon has Alaric close in his arms. Closer than the doorway at the boarding house, the kitchen counter, the couch in the library, closer than in bed. Skin cannot keep them apart much longer. The moon is a Cheshire cat's grin overhead. There are no clouds to mar the view of the universe. They kiss as only the dead and dying can, without space or time left to pin them down. 

Damon does it quickly, like they'd planned. One moment they're kissing and the next Damon is killing him.

He's tried to be gentle as he can about it Alaric thinks but there's little that can be gentle in tearing open a carotid artery. Damon's teeth are almost precise from years of practice, and his lips are strangely soft on Alaric's neck, and he drinks with a boundless need that sends every single star spinning into supernova.

At first it's all pain like Alaric had expected and wanted, a final jolting blow to his mortal coil. Everything is pain but he can feel it everywhere, the way his toes curl up, the way his hands scrabble at the earth, dirt pushed under his fingernails, the frantic kick of his heart. His head lolls back and Damon drinks deeper, his arms around Alaric infinitely tightening, and Alaric feels the blood leaving his body and then the pain's fast going with it.

Damon has hold of him, Damon is keeping him close, Damon doesn't pause even once as he swallows and swallows and swallows. 

A fine misty fog has rolled in over the hill. Alaric thinks so at least. It settles dewy and wet around them and cloaks Damon in a rich gray that suits him. 

Over him, at his neck, Damon is drinking. Alaric feels Damon's dark hair soft against his skin, black paint hair against all that vermillion blood. They must be pretty, like a picture, Damon draining out his life high above everything with even the moon smiling. A good night for it, this night.

Somewhere far away Damon is feeding his deepest hunger and Alaric is lying against him in the grass. If he narrows his gaze and watches the stars just right they start reenacting their oldest stories for him, the bowl of sky made a black-white-silver cinema. 

Alaric smiles with delight. There is no more pain here, only quietly building quiet and fading color, and he's tired and content with Damon so close, and knows he should sleep soon.

Damon seems to know too. After a long time he pulls back a bit, pressing his fingers over the rawness where Alaric's neck meets shoulder, though it hardly stems the flow. “You look tired, Ric,” Damon says gently. Damon could always read his mind so well. The purpled veins are gone and his fangs have receded and his face is his Damon's again. “You should go to sleep.”

Alaric tries to nod but his brain won't send the right signals. He yawns instead, struggles to yawn. “I think you're right. What about you?”

“I'll be here,” says Damon. He puts his forehead to Alaric's. It's the only part of his face not dipped in blood. Blood is on his cheekbones and ruddies his lips, his chin. Blood soaks streaks and Rorschach blots into the olive green of his shirt. They must be beautiful, Alaric thinks again, like a painting. This time Damon has all the color and Alaric knows that he's the one who's pale and cold and growing colder. 

“Okay,” says Alaric. He finds that he can smile at Damon through the fog even though it's thicker now, and over them the night sky is dancing. Damon has wiped some of the blood away with his sleeve and returns the smile. It's one of those rare genuine Damon turns of mouth without even a hint of a smirk, only untainted joy, and Alaric is happy to close his eyes with that as a sight to take to sleep with.

“Wake me if you need me,” Alaric says. They are the last words that he says.

As far as last words went they weren't bound for Bartlett's Quotations but they didn't totally suck, considering. Kinda King Arthur, really, Damon would say.

 

* * *

 

Damon must need him because Alaric comes awake all at once.

Everything is the same and nothing is. Damon is still holding onto him on the hilltop, still smiling wide as he's ever smiled. But the stars have wheeled low over the sky, showing different faces now. Damon is wearing a gray t-shirt and there is no blood on him. Alaric remembers blood.

Alaric blinks and winces all over and feels made of sand and shattered glass. 

Damon is gripping him, squeezing him, angling him upwards, looking much too thrilled about Alaric's current state of feeling like utter shit. 

“Hey,” says Damon. 

“Hey,” says Alaric. “How long was I out?”

“Entirely too long,” says Damon. “But it doesn't matter. I've already forgiven you.”

Alaric grins, can do that at least, and Damon reaches to snag an object from the grass: a green outdoorsman's canteen, made of beaten tin and tinted camouflage-colors. 

When he unscrews the cap, the heightened smell of human blood is both cloyingly repellant and impossibly sweet. Alaric's hand is shaking as he reaches, and Damon's hand is shaking as he starts to pass it over.

They look at each other over the canteen, their fingers intertwining on tin. For once Alaric's touch is colder than Damon's.

“Please,” whispers Damon. If Alaric thought he'd seen the towering heights of Damon joyful, this is its opposite, Damon so absolutely serious that his lips make an uncompromising line, a boldly underlined statement. 

He catches Damon's too-serious gaze, levels it with the certainty in his own. “That's what I was going to say,” says Alaric. 

Together their hands tilt the canteen toward his dry lips. He's never been so thirsty.

Alaric measures out a perfect shot's-worth of blood in his mouth and tosses it down with Damon watching like his own life and death are in the balance. When it's done Damon makes a sound that Alaric will tease him later came perilously close to a sob. 

Then Damon is laughing loud enough to echo across the mountains into West Virginia and rocking them back and forth while the world goes into nuclear meltdown around Alaric. Damon's arms are around him too like they can ride out the crushing radioactive wave of it. 

Everything is sight and scent and taste and touch and sound, sounds everywhere, Alaric can hear birds rustling in the trees and every leaf too, and then all the sand and broken glass in his body is set on fire and becomes molten lava becomes impenetrable steel. He can see past the stars into distant galaxies, but he turns away from the sun. 

Through it all Damon's arm is slung under his shoulder. He's with him through the worst of the firestorms. The craving torment their fevers leave behind is part of Alaric now and won't ever go out. He shudders, smolders, smokes, alive somehow and starving and grasping for life, like the forgotten flames in the pit licking at the last remains of branches. 

Damon's tilting more blood into his mouth from the canteen, and Alaric drinks. It tastes of burned honey and camping tin. Strange that with so many new-found enhanced sensations, it's blood that doesn't taste like itself anymore. It is sweet instead of sour, life where it had meant death. Alaric drinks deep, and Damon's hands on the bottle are not shaking now.

He leans in to chase the last drops from Alaric's lips with his tongue. Then his tongue pushes, insistent, seeking, into Alaric's mouth. Runs the rim of his gumline until Alaric gasp-growls, fists a hand in Damon's t-shirt and cries out without words. There are no words for this. 

His teeth are rearranging, his jaw shifting, and then hard sharply pointed fangs are breaking through and sliding into place with a sound like _snick_ , a sound Alaric knows well. He puts his head back, breathing through the change, knows that around his hazel eyes dark veins are gathering blood and depth. 

Damon tips his tongue against the edge of a fang, just enough of a nick so that he's Alaric's first drawn blood. They kiss on the hillside underneath the trees, two vampires, exquisite as a motion picture.

When they move free Damon is wearing a deeper smile than he had before Alaric shut his eyes, wider than the smile he'd worn when Alaric awoke. There's a finely satisfied smirk in it, but all the rest is heady elation and ready love and shared expectation. 

It is the singular best expression Alaric has ever seen on Damon's face, and it long remains unrivaled.

Then as the centuries pass there are kisses even more poignant than the one that first drew out Alaric's fangs, and smiles from Damon that prove even better than the one he shows here, at the beginning of it all.

  



End file.
